Keeping the World Away (42 page)

Mme Verlon took her into a formal drawing room. ‘Do sit,’ she said, and sat herself, on the very edge of one of the sofas. She had her hands clasped on her knees and a polite, enquiring expression on her face.

Gillian cleared her throat, feeling suddenly embarrassed. It seemed ridiculous to have come at all. ‘My father, Cameron Mortimer, lived here, he was born here, it was his home until he was twenty-two.’ Mme Verlon inclined her head, encouragingly. ‘When my grandmother was widowed and sold the house she took very little of what had been in it – all the furniture and possessions were sold. But she took one of the pictures to the flat she’d bought and later, after she was killed in a car accident, there was a … a fight over it, between my father and his brother.’

‘A fight?’ Mme Verlon looked astonished.

‘Yes. I know it sounds weird. My father won’t talk about it. But it seems that my uncle was going to take this little painting and my father objected and it was sold and … well … you bought it.’

‘Ah,’ Mme Verlon said, ‘the Gwen John?’

‘Was it really a Gwen John?’ Gillian could hardly keep the excitement out of her voice.

There was a pause. For a moment Mme Verlon’s face still wore its enquiring expression, but then a frown took its place. Ever since the retrospective of Gwen John’s work at the Barbican in 1985, she’d been faintly worried that the Mortimer family would realise that they had surely let a treasure go. She’d thought about them as she looked at the paintings and became more convinced than ever that what she had in her possession was indeed a variant of
The Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris
. Her painting must by now be worth at least twenty times what she had paid for it. She had been astonished, in 1988, to read that a Gwen John oil,
The
Precious
Book
, had been sold for £160,000, and this had made her feel nervous about what she possessed. She’d thought about taking it to be authenticated by the organisers of the exhibition but then there would have been questions as to its provenance and she did not want to mention the Mortimers. The painting was hers, and she loved it, and that was enough – she did not need that stamp of authority. She was almost fearful to show the painting to anyone who might recognise it, and last year, after she had visited the latest Gwen and Augustus John exhibition at the Tate Britain, this apprehension had grown. It was beyond doubt that the painting she possessed was also by Gwen John and she felt guilty, as though she had cheated the Mortimers deliberately.

But nevertheless, she nodded, and told the young woman that yes, she was almost certain it was a painting by Gwen John, a variant of the well-known painting of her room in Paris. ‘You know her work?’ she asked.

‘My art teacher took us to the exhibition at the Tate,’ Gillian said. ‘I loved her paintings. They are so quiet, very simple and pretty.’

‘Quiet, simple, perhaps, in effect at least, but pretty? No, I don’t think so. It seems the wrong word, if I may say so, a little insulting.’

‘Do you still have it? The painting?’

‘But of course.’

‘I was wondering if you might allow me to look at it?’

They climbed the stairs to the second floor where Gillian was led through a large bedroom into a smaller room, and there on the wall was the painting, looking exactly the same (except for its frame) as the one she had seen in the Tate exhibition. She couldn’t help smiling.

‘It amuses you?’ Mme Verlon asked, seeming surprised.

‘It’s not that,’ Gillian said. ‘It’s that it is such a modest little painting to have caused so much trouble – I can’t quite believe my father could have got so angry about James wanting it.’

‘Ah, but it would not be the painting itself which caused the disagreement, I’m sure. In these cases, it is nearly always to do with the significance of what is fought over.’

‘Yes, of course, that’s right, that’s the point. But all the same, it’s hard to guess what the significance was. My father doesn’t care about art. I wouldn’t have thought this painting would have made any impression.’

‘It is a beautiful painting,’ Mme Verlon sounded offended. ‘Even if it were not a Gwen John, though I believe it is.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘I haven’t had it examined by an expert.’

‘Why not?’

‘On the contrary, why? I love it. It means a great deal to me. I would never sell it. I don’t need to know, I trust my own judgement.’

‘Thank you,’ Gillian said, after another few minutes. ‘I’m glad to have seen it. I like to think of my grandmother loving it.’

‘Did she?’

‘What?’

‘Love it?’

‘I assume so, if it was the only picture she took when she left this house.’

‘She did not seem to me exactly to love it. She knew nothing about art. The painting had some history for her which was not, I think, entirely happy.’

‘Really?’ Gillian couldn’t keep the curiosity, the eagerness to know, out of her voice, but Mme Verlon was already leading the way down the stairs and straight to the front door. Clearly, her patience had been exhausted.

Coming level with her, Gillian attempted delaying tactics. ‘You were saying you suspected that the painting had an unhappy history for my grandmother?’

Mme Verlon shrugged, her hand on the catch of the door, about to open it. ‘It is a long time ago,’ she said. ‘I was only with Mrs Mortimer once, for an hour. I cannot remember why I had that impression. You must ask your father.’

‘Oh, he knows nothing, or if he did he won’t tell me.’

‘It is private, perhaps, too painful.’

‘But she’s been dead ages.’

‘Family matters can still be painful.’ The door had been opened.

‘Thank you for letting me see the painting, and the house,’ Gillian said.

‘You were lucky to come now. Soon this house will be sold and we will move back to Paris.’

‘Will the Gwen John go too?’

‘But of course.’

Gillian hesitated. She had her camera with her. ‘I hardly dare ask,’ she said, ‘but could I take a picture of the painting?’

Mme Verlon looked annoyed. ‘Why did you not make this request when you were looking at the painting?’

‘I didn’t like to.’

‘And now you’d like to?’

‘It was hearing that you’ll be taking it to Paris.’ She blushed, knowing this hardly made sense. ‘I’ll be very quick. Please?’

Abruptly, Mme Verlon shut the door and pointed up the stairs. ‘Two minutes,’ she said. ‘I am busy, I am going out.’

Gillian raced up the stairs and through the bedroom into the small room where the painting hung. Her hands trembled as she took her camera out of her bag. The light was good and she didn’t need a flash. Quickly, she took a dozen shots, one after the other, and then rushed back to the hall, camera still in her hands. Mme Verlon had the door wide open. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she said, and got a brief smile in return.

All the way back home, she was thinking of the painting. What had been its power? Why did it have such a hold over her grandmother? How could any single painting have been so significant to her family?

*

The photographs came out well. Gillian had the best one enlarged and then she framed it. The choice of frame was tricky. At first, she’d thought a simple, plain, narrow wooden frame would suit it best, but the simplicity of the frame somehow worked against the subtlety of the painting. She tried a broader frame, still of plain wood, with the same result, then decided on a darker wood. This worked better, though it was not perfect. But it looked
convincing
, especially from a distance, and it was from a distance that her father was going to see it.

She planned it well. There was a small spare room on the ground floor at the back of their house. A sofa-bed, a small table, and a bookcase – that was all it held. It had a sash-window overlooking the garden, which faced south and let in plenty of light. It was an innocuous room, uncluttered, without personality, and would do very well.

Gillian hung the photograph not on the larger wall opposite the window but on the wall to the right of it. It looked as if it had been there for ever. She stood in the doorway and imagined her father walking in and seeing it – his shock would surely be impossible to hide. Then she would pounce, when he was still reeling, and ask him why his mother had cared so much about this painting. What was the unhappy history Mme Verlon had alluded to? She could hardly wait.

*

Cameron Mortimer had never been entirely happy about his daughter studying art. She was a clever girl, why did she have to do something so lightweight? He didn’t see anything to do with art as being a proper career. Nonsense, his wife had said, there were plenty of ‘proper’ careers following on from studying art. But his disappointment in Gillian’s choice was intense. Perhaps if he had had a son, or even another daughter, he would not have cared so much, could have brought himself to look on an art education more indulgently, but Gillian was his only child and bore the brunt of his disappointment.

He loved her, though. There was no doubt about that. He adored her, and not just for her beauty and talents. Everyone else’s daughter seemed to him dull and dreary beside Gillian whose vitality sparkled wherever she went. He could remember picking her up from school one day, soon after she’d started, and feeling such an overwhelming sense of joy when he saw her running towards him across the playground, ahead of the other children, making them all look somehow slow and dull. Everything about her seemed so bright – how she looked, the way she spoke. And
other
parents were aware of it. He saw them admiring her, and he worried that this admiration might turn into resentment. But it didn’t. Gillian wasn’t a show-off. She rather inclined the other way, adopting a self-deprecating manner quite early in her school life, and Cameron was glad to see it. He didn’t want her to be too aware of her own talents.

It had taken him a while to realise how good she was at drawing. ‘Look at this,’ his wife had said, when Gillian was only six. He’d looked, and seen a picture of a man and a woman, wearing brilliantly coloured clothes, standing in a garden. Their heads were a bit large, he thought, and all their features exaggerated. Beth had been exasperated. She told him that children of six are mostly still drawing stick figures and can’t do proper bodies or faces. He’d accepted her word, without thinking his daughter’s ability special. But by the time she was ten, even he had realised that she had talent. He watched her draw their cat jumping from the window sill and had been amazed at how she’d caught the swift movement.

But what surprised him more than Gillian’s artistic talent was what he could only describe to himself as her happy nature. She didn’t get her exuberance from him, nor did it come from her mother. Beth was pleasant, quite sunny-natured, but had none of her daughter’s sheer energy. No, it came from Ailsa, he was sure, from Ailsa when she was young. Of course, he had never known his mother when she was young but he had been told about her often enough by his father. ‘Your mother,’ he used to tell Cameron, ‘lit up everything around her when she was a girl, when I first met her. She radiated energy, life-force, call it what you like – marvellous, you have no idea.’ Cameron had agreed: he had no idea because by the time he knew his mother the vitality had vanished. To him, she was beautiful but she was quiet, subdued. Where had her energy gone? And why? He hadn’t dared ask his father. Beth said she suspected his mother must have been a disappointed, rather sad woman, from what she had been told about her, and he had been offended. ‘She wasn’t in the least sad, not till Dad died,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t know where you got that idea
from
. Mum was perfectly content, she had everything she could possibly want.’

But, after she was killed, he realised that he hadn’t really known her. If he’d known her, then he’d have understood why that damned painting meant so much to her. He’d have known what she saw, or what she thought she saw, in it. His father might have understood but then he knew about art, not just about his wife. That was where Gillian must get her artistic ability and taste from, genes passed down from her grandfather, having skipped a generation. James had no artistic leanings either, though he had pretended otherwise, caught trying to steal that picture. Caught literally in the act, the painting in his hands, he was putting it into his briefcase, not a bit ashamed. Asked what he thought he was doing, he’d claimed he was just taking a memento. Cameron had grabbed the briefcase and emptied it onto the table: six spoons (a gift to his parents, he knew, from a silversmith friend), a paperweight, a small clock, and a writing case.

‘They’re just personal bits,’ James had protested. ‘I’ll pay for them, if it bothers you.’

‘You can’t help yourself to anything,’ Cameron had shouted. ‘Mum left all her personal effects to be sold and the money given to those potty Scottish charities.’

‘You’re being ridiculous,’ James yelled back. ‘Typically petty. What do a few odds and ends matter, for God’s sake! No one will ever know. Give me my case back.’

Cameron handed it back, empty. ‘We’ll have these things valued,’ he snapped, ‘and then you can buy them.’

‘I’m not buying them.’

‘You just said you would.’

‘I never thought you meant it. I can’t believe this.’

‘Well, I do. It’s the principle of the thing. She made that will. It’s going to be carried out, to the letter.’

He didn’t know what possessed him. Anger, he supposed, with his mother, not with his brother. James had tried to snatch the painting back, and Cameron pushed his brother unnecessarily hard so that he’d fallen and cut his head on the corner of the table.
‘Bastard!’
James shouted, scrambling up, and Cameron had felt a moment of regret, so he’d muttered, ‘Sorry.’

‘You can stick your “sorry”,’ James said, ‘I never want to see you again,’ and he had crashed out of the flat.

Left alone there, Cameron felt utterly wretched. Even picking up the painting and the other articles James had been going to take was painful. What, as his brother had said, would it have mattered? There was nothing he wanted himself. He didn’t want the spoons or the paperweight (though he remembered it on his mother’s little writing desk) and as for the painting, he hated it. It was the cause of trouble. He associated it now with his mother becoming odd, and it was that which had led to her death. She ought to have stayed safely at home, enjoying a calm and peaceful old age.